Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/394

Journal of the Folk-Song Society, Vol. III., Part I. London: 84 Carlisle Mansions, Victoria Street. 4to, pp. vi, 58.

Recent numbers of the Folk-Song Society's Journal show progress, not only in collecting, but in method. Comparing them with earlier issues we note a marked increase of critical skill in the Notes. Far more attention is paid to the subject-matter of the verses and to tracing sources and parallels than was the case at first, and wider knowledge of authorities is shown. Expurgation still seems to be carried rather far (though of course it is impossible to judge of the character of the omitted verses); some of the contributors are inclined to be discursive, and the differing opinions of the musical critics who hold a symposium on each air in turn are sometimes amusing: nevertheless, as at present conducted, the Journal is really valuable to the folk-lorist, not to the musician alone. We are especially pleased with the subject-index to Vols. I. and II. which is appended to the present Part, and which well repays study. Many will be unprepared to hear that some fifteen or twenty standard "old ballads," including such notable ones as "Gil Morice," "Lamkin," "Lord Randal, my Son," "Binnorie," and others, are still sung by the peasantry of England to airs hitherto unrecorded. Then we have new examples of ancient well-known love-songs: "I sowed the seeds of love," "There is an ale-house in yonder town," "I will give you the keys of my heart," and others in the same style. Christmas carols, consisting either of versified mediaeval legends or of moral (seventeenth-century?) verses of the most lugubrious description; other festival songs (we would direct Mr. Gerish's attention to the May Songs in vols. i. p. 180, and ii. p. 182, and Mr. Ordish's to the Pace-Egging Songs, vol. ii. p. 231), agricultural songs, musical toasts, sailors' chanties, a cattle-call, a "bird-starver's" cry; and more remarkable than these, two or three specimens of the cante-fable, in which a short song is sung by one of the characters in a prose story, in the fashion still in vogue, as Mr. Walter Jekyll tells us, among the Jamaican negroes. For the most part, however, the songs are narrative "ditties," intended to be sung as solos. Three or four are humorous stories of revenge or outwitting, but they treat chiefly of the exceedingly tempestuous